***Of This And That In The Old North Adamsville Neighborhood-In Search Of…… 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I have spent not a little time lately touting the virtues of the Internet in allowing me and the members of the North Adamsville Class of 1964, or what is left of it, the remnant that has survived and is findable with the new technologies to communicate with each other some fifty years and many miles later on a class website recently set up to gather in classmates for our 50^th anniversary reunion.  (Some will never be found by choice or by being excluded from the “information super-highway” that they have not been able to navigate.) Interestingly those who have joined the site have, more or less, felt free to send me private e-mails telling me stories about what happened back in the day in school or what has happened to them since their jailbreak from the confines of the old town.

Some stuff is interesting to a point, you know, those endless tales about the doings and not doings of the grandchildren, odd hobbies and other ventures since taken up in retirement and so on although not worthy of me making a little off-hand commentary on. Some stuff is either too sensitive or too risqué to publish on a family-friendly site. Some stuff, some stuff about the old days and what did, or did not, happened to, or between, fellow classmates, you know the boy-girl thing (other now acceptable relationships were below the radar then) has perked my interest. Take the big-time class “item” thing between Billy Badger and Jenny McCabe (not their real names but those “in the know” know who I am talking about) lit up the senior year night, portended to have something written in the wind and then came crashing down...        

…he knew, knew deep in his bones, knew on the face of it too that he could not keep her, keep her to himself, keep her settled down and so he accepted that she would blow away like the wind on him sometime and it was just a matter of how long he could keep her. It hadn’t started out that way, at least he did not see it like that at the beginning, see that she was a wayward wind, see that she had deeply imbibed the new wave coming across the continent. You know the mood change that started when Elvis and a bunch of other hungry guys [and a few women] ripped it up with a new sound, a new not your parents sound, but blessed, no, twice blessed rock and roll. And then other guys, other be-bop guys who had been around but were just then getting noticed call the beat, called the beat down to rise up and play themselves true, no hassles man, no hassles. All under the umbrella of dropping that dragged out, square, red scare cold war night thing the ancients had everybody stirred up about. A little later, in Billy and Jenny time the music changed up again, and square was nowhere to be. Billy sensed it, sensed before Jenny even but he with ten thousand worries in his head blew it off, called it a passing fad.     

Sure they, Billy and Jenny in case you thought I was talking about soe other couple, had met conventionally enough senior year at old North Adamsville High, had responded to each other’s furtive glances in Miss Williams’ study hall, had danced around each other at Doc’s Drugstore where all the kids hung out after school to listen the latest music, their music juke box and had finally gone out on a double date (he without car at the time, one of his the thousand worries) at the local drive-in theater where she, sitting in the back seat with him, surprised him with her sexual advances, things that a young girl maybe should not know about, or how to do. Stuff that he wasn’t all that familiar with except in bragging talk in the boys’ locker room but got him stirred up, got him to act like a tamed puppy with her once    she knew that he liked what she did to him. When he asked her about it later, not that night but a couple of weeks later, she just said girls knew stuff like that and she had learned it from her first boyfriend who was older and taught her a couple of things he liked and she wanted to please him so she learned them. He let it pass, hell, it pleased him too.  And so they were an “item” that last year of school.   

Then that summer after graduation the music at Doc’s jukebox changed, got more charged, frankly, got more sassy and sexual far different from their parents’ sappy sentimental stuff that didn’t get anybody’s heart rate up. And she changed, well maybe not so much changed as got caught up in the new dispensation, the new moves. When they went on dates it wasn’t to the movies or to some restaurant but to Smiley’s Bar &Grille on the outskirts of town where old Smiley had a hot new cover band, the Rocking Rockets, playing all the classic big beat rockabilly stuff from guys like Warren Smith with his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby and taboo sassy blues numbers from Ike, Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf, that she flipped out over. Not that she, like Warren said, would dance on the tables and stuff like that but that she would dance with lots of guys, would be flirty, tease flirty right before his eyes. When he questioned her on it she just said “don’t be a square, daddy” and refused to discuss it further. And some nights when he called her mother answered to say she was not home, had gone out with the girls, or something like that. Yeah, he knew deep in his bones …       

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…he had changed, changed she knew deep in her bones, changed too much for her tastes, changed into a “square” just like all the parents in town and all the kids who didn’t want to have fun and just be like them and so she knew, sooner or later she was not sure which, she would have to drop him, drop him for somebody who was fun. The problem was that in square old North Adamsville that someone who was fun had not passed her door, but she had hopes. In the meantime she thought she would stick with old gloomy Gus him as he fretted his life away when she started swaying when the juke-box played some hot, latest rock and roll tune or the cover band at Smiley’s started her dancing to the beat on something like Warren Smith’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby.

Funny, as she thought back to that time a little over a year before when they had eyed each other in Miss Williams’ study hall that she was then attracted to his easy manner, his sly boyish-ness which she thought she could talk him out of with a little coaxing (he had made her laugh when after they became an “item” he said that the eyeing had really been furtive glances-he said funny things like that then). They had not spoken a word until they had spent what seemed like a lifetime dancing around each other at Doc’s Drugstore where he put in endless nickels and dimes in the juke-box and then just sat there dreamy-eyed looking at her until she said enough and went over to him and stood right in front of him and dared him to ignore her with her look. He had surrendered easily enough and they became an “item” after a subsequent drive-in movie date where she had shown him a few things in the back seat of her friend Debbie’s boyfriend’s car. He liked her doing that stuff and she knew he liked her doing that stuff although he was a very shy boy for the first few times. So this was how they had spent their last year of school together in some kind of bliss.

Things changed though, changed when a new breeze came through the town, when Doc’s juke-box started to almost jump off the walls what with the latest rock tunes coming one right after another. But he did not catch on, wanted to stay mired in his parents’ music and so the frets began-his about marriage and settling down, hers about having fun rocking the night away. The worse times had been when  they went to Smiley’s, the hot-spot bar on the outside of town and who had plenty of booze and bop and guys who eyed her, maybe not shy furtively like he had but eyed her like they wanted to have a good time, wanted to have fun rather mope around and be square. He would just sit there and be mopey while she danced with a few guys, a couple of whom she had given her telephone number to although they had not worked out. She began telling her mother sometimes that when he called to tell him she was out and that she didn’t know when she would be back.  Even when, like this night, she was just sitting up in her room waiting for a new guy who had danced her off her feet the night before was supposed to call and maybe, just maybe, want to have fun …